Umm... My players must be odd then because my parties often gather the resources to create fortresses and influence world politics/economics. One of my favorite instances was buying a large plot of land, building a fortress restaurant (from which we continued our assissin bussiness) and then levatated the fortress. It cost us a considerable amout of time, money, (and assassinations) but was great fun. Seems like something like this would be a push over in 4e (at least monetarily)